13-year-old raped by FB friend

SUBANG JAYA: A 13-year-old girl was allegedly raped by a man she had met on Facebook only about a week earlier after allowing him to fetch her home from school.

Police said the girl reportedly met her rapist on Jan 15 after he added her as a “friend” on Facebook. The pair struck up a friendship and met four times within a week.

“He never touched her then. However, on Jan 23, the man made plans to pick up the girl from her school in USJ 8. He met her outside the compound at about 12.45pm under the pretence of driving her home,” said Subang Jaya OCPD Asst Comm Yahaya Ramli here yesterday.

However, the man drove the girl to a secluded area in USJ 4, where he locked the doors of his Myvi before forcing himself on her.

The man, who is in his 20s, later dropped the girl back at her school before driving off.

“He is still at large. The girl’s mother questioned her about a week later after noticing something amiss about her daughter’s behaviour.

“The child then confessed to having been sexually assaulted by a Facebook friend and she was brought to a clinic,” said ACP Yahaya, adding that the mother lodged a police report on Jan 28.

The case is being investigated under Section 376 of the Penal Code for rape. According to the Bukit Aman Sexual and Child Investigation Division, there were 12,054 rape cases between 2010 and mid-2014. Of that number, 80% of the victims knew their rapists.

ACP Yahaya urged parents to take interest in their children’s online acti­vity, specifically who they befriended and spoke to on social media.

“It’s a parent’s responsibility to monitor their children so that they will not fall prey to sex predators online. Young children are still naive and at high risk of being taken advantage of,” he said.

A picture of AirAsia Flight 8501’s tail. Ongoing investigations are revealing that the captain might have been out of his seat conducting an unorthodox procedure when his co-pilot lost control. – AFP Pic, January 31, 2015.The captain of the AirAsia jet that crashed into the sea in December was out of his seat conducting an unorthodox procedure when his co-pilot apparently lost control, and by the time he returned it was too late to save the plane, two people familiar with the investigation said.

Details emerging of the final moments of flight 8501 are likely to focus attention partly on maintenance, procedures and training, though Indonesian officials have stressed publicly that it is too early to draw any firm conclusions.

The Airbus A320 jet plunged into the Java sea while en route from Surabaya, Indonesia, to Singapore on December 28, killing all 162 people on board.

It had been suffering maintenance faults with a key flight control computer for over a week, and one person familiar with the matter said the captain had flown on the same plane with the intermittently faulty device just days before the crash.

AirAsia said it would not comment while the matter was under investigation by the National Transportation Safety Committee (NTSC) of Indonesia.

Reuters reported this week that maintenance problems on the Flight Augmentation Computer (FAC), and the way the pilots reacted to them, were at the heart of the investigation.

After trying to reset this device, pilots pulled a circuit-breaker to cut its power, Bloomberg News reported on Friday.

People familiar with the matter told Reuters it was the Indonesian captain Iriyanto who took this step, rather than his less experienced French co-pilot Remy Plesel, who was flying the plane.

The outage would not directly upset the aircraft but would remove flight envelope protection, which prevents a pilot from taking a plane beyond its safety limits, leaving the junior pilot to fly the jet manually in delicate high altitude conditions.

The decision to cut off the FAC has surprised people following the investigation because the usual procedure for resetting it is to press a button on the overhead panel.

"You can reset the FAC, but to cut all power to it is very unusual," said one A320 pilot, who declined to be identified. "You don't pull the circuit breaker unless it was an absolute emergency. I don't know if there was one in this case, but it is very unusual."

It is also significant because to pull the circuit breaker the captain had to rise from his seat.

The circuit breakers are on a wall panel immediately behind the co-pilot and hard or impossible to reach from the seated position on the left side, where the captain sits, according to two experienced pilots and published diagrams of the cockpit.

Shortly afterwards the junior pilot pulled the plane into a sharp climb from which investigators have said it stalled or lost lift.

"It appears he was surprised or startled by this," said a person familiar with the investigation, referring to the decision to cut power to the affected computer.

The captain eventually resumed control, but a person familiar with the matter said he was not in a position to intervene immediately to recover the aircraft from its upset.

Data already published on the plane's trajectory suggest it may have been difficult for someone to move around the cockpit in an upward-tilting and by then possibly unstable aircraft, but there is so far no confirmation of the cockpit movements.

"The co-pilot pulled the plane up, and by the time the captain regained the controls it was too late," one of the people familiar with the investigation said.

Tatang Kurniadi, chief of Indonesia's NTSC, told Reuters there had been no delay in the captain resuming control but declined further comment.

Airbus declined to comment.

Lawyers for the family of the French co-pilot say they have filed a lawsuit against AirAsia in Paris for "endangering the lives of others" by flying the route without official authorisation on that day. Investigators have said the accident was not related to the permit issue.

AirAsia did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the lawsuit.

Although more is becoming known about the chain of events, people familiar with the investigation warned against making assumptions on the accident's cause, which needed more analysis.

Safety experts say air crashes are most often caused by a chain of events, each of which is necessary but not sufficient to explain the underlying causes of the accident. – Reuters, January 31, 2014.

- See more at: http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/malaysia/article/airasia-captain-left-seat-before-jet-lost-control-say-sources#sthash.MBk8v7BB.dpuf

Rafizi RamliTHE price of RON95 and diesel for February without subsidy should be set at RM1.62 and RM1.32 per litre says PKR secretary-general Rafizi Ramli.

Writing on his Facbook page, Rafizi said these calculations were based on MOPS (Means of Platts Singapore) for Singapore Mogas 95 Unleaded and Gasoil standard, and also the currency exchange set by Bank Negara.

“Because the rakyat continue to pay higher than market price, Barisan Nasional received a windfall by collecting petrol tax without announcing it to the rakyat,” the Pandan MP stated.

Malaysians have been paying RM1.91 for Ron95 and RM1.93 for diesel for the month of January since the turn of the year. With that, they have unknowingly paid more than RM1 billion in taxes to the government over the past two months as pump prices remain on a controlled float.“For the month of January 2015, the rakyat paid RM307 million in petrol taxes for RON95 and RM209 million for diesel,” he added.

Rafizi demanded that the government eliminate the “hidden” tax imposed on pump purchases, which in turn should bring the unsubsidised price of RON95 to RM1.62 per litre and of diesel to RM1.65 per litre, based on the average pump price for the whole of January.

“This act of taxing the rakyat through the purchase of petrol and diesel at a time when the nation’s economy is getting worse shows the financial desperation of Datuk Seri Najib Razak’s administration,” Rafizi stressed further.

Pic: Shin Min Daily / China PressSINGAPORE: About 150 investors lost their hard-earned S$50 million (equivalent to RM130 million) in the alleged SureWin4U get-rich-quick scam which is believed to be spearheaded by a local Malaysian.

30 investors from Singapore and China has lodged a police report on behalf of more than 100 investors earlier today.

According to a report by Shin Min Daily, a local Chinese newspaper in Singapore, it was reported that one of the investors went to Sri Lanka on 5 March last year to participate in an investment plan event organized by the scheme. The man reportedly begun to invest after attending the event. A total amount of S$1.23 million (equivalent to RM3.19 million) was invested in the scheme.

“This get-rich-quick scheme is spearheaded by a self-proclaimed “Datuk” from Malaysia,” one of the scheme investors told Shin Min Daily.

According to information provided by the investor, a total of S$50 million was lost in the scheme. Of which, the highest amount lost per individual is S$8,000,000 (equivalent to RM20 million) and the least is S$40,000 (equivalent to around RM100,000).

Lee, 40, a female investor in the scheme told Shin Min Daily that she joined the scheme in December 2013.

“I was recommended by a friend of mine to join the scheme. They told me that the investment return rate is high. Thus I made the decision to invest S$25,000 in the scheme (equivalent to around RM65,000), and I got S$1800(equivalent to around RM4,680) in return monthly.

“I borrowed S$10,000 (equivalent to around RM25,000) last July to make an extra investment in the scheme.

“Much to my astonishment, my upline told me last month that profits that I made through the scheme could not be withdrawn,” she added.